


with a sharpened tooth and a jagged nail

by consumptive_sphinx



Category: High Noon Over Camelot - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Canon Trans Character, Canon-Typical Background Genderbending, Canon-Typical Cannibalism, Dramatic Irony, Gunshot Wounds, Half-Sibling Incest, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Trans Male Character, cultural worldbuilding, less than canon-typical but still noteworthy lack of communication, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:14:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25578637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consumptive_sphinx/pseuds/consumptive_sphinx
Summary: Mordred trusts Gawain with his life, with his heart, with everything except the truth.
Relationships: Gawain/Mordred (High Noon Over Camelot)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 50





	with a sharpened tooth and a jagged nail

**Author's Note:**

> you read the tags. (if you didn’t read the tags, go back and read the tags.) you know what you’re in for. i take no responsibility for anything you see beyond this point.

Mordred comes into Camelot riding the motorcycle and wearing the clothes of a gang of raiders who’d tried to kill him, carrying their food and water rations and their guns and ammunition in his pack, and with their blood wiped carefully off of his face. He doesn’t know how wastelanders do things but in Annwn you’d bring a gift if you hoped to join a tribe, and he’ll follow any guidelines he has; it’s not like there’s a surplus of them.

They ask surprisingly few questions — ‘What’s your name, can you shoot’ — and he answers with ‘Mordred’ and ‘not well.’ He doesn’t  _ think _ anyone recognizes him (which makes sense, it’s been what, eleven years? Twelve?) but if someone does he’s got a well-practiced lie as to where he’s been and what he’s been doing all this time and it’s fine. It’s going to be fine. He’s fine. He’s made it this far. Everything is going to be fine.

Camelot is bright and metallic and loud and footsteps clang and echo off the walls and it hasn’t even been an hour but Mordred is already reeling from all of the newness and noise when someone takes his arm — a man maybe ten years older than he is, lanky with hair the color of rust — and leads him away from the sharp noise into a building of corrugated iron. He walks loudly but at least isn’t yelling; Mordred follows him.

“We've got a spare room for you in here,” the man says, in a voice that’s mid-range and vaguely metallic-sounding, “but if you’d rather be somewhere else you can swap with someone. If you need anything they always tell newcomers to go to Kay but they’ve got a temper so I’d recommend asking me instead, or Bedivere if you find him first, he’s the very tall one with one arm. I’m Gawain Orkney, what’s your name?”

Gawain Orkney, he knows that name, he knows he knows that name, where does he know that name from. “Mordred.”

“Do you have a surname?” Gawain asks, one eyebrow raised.

— and that derails the thought about where he knows Gawain from, because right. Yes. Wastelanders have surnames. Mordred had a surname once, and he even remembers what it was, but he can’t claim Pendragon and he doesn’t in fact have another and he hadn’t thought to come up with one and anything he comes up with now will be blatantly made up, nobody’s family name is Shadow or Lumin — “No,” he says, after a silence that stretches on for much too long, tries to sound firm about it. “Just Mordred.”

Gawain blinks, then smiles, lopsided and overly toothy. “Alright, Mordred. Nobody here’ll ask, and if someone does you can tell them to fuck off, there’s plenty of people who’ll back you up on that one. You run into any trouble on the way?”

“Not much. A couple of raiders who thought I looked like an easy target.” And had considered anyone wearing Saxon leathers and carrying a knife not worth letting live, but he’s hardly going to say that to a wastelander let alone a Camelot knight. “They won’t be bothering anyone anymore.” And Mordred has clothes made out of fabric now and a gun he’ll have to learn how to shoot and ammunition for it, and supplies to trade besides; leaving the bodies had felt unconscionably wasteful but bringing the meat would hardly have made him friends in Camelot and it had already been quite a lot to carry, so he’d eaten what he could that night and left the rest in the morning.

“Ghouls?” Gawain’s voice was sharp already but it’s sharper now.

_ Augh. _ “No, just idiots.”

“Mm. Shame, always nice to clear out the vultures.” Mordred bites his tongue, but Gawain doesn’t seem inclined to say anything more on the subject. “Here’s your key, I’ll let you settle in? I’ll be at the Joyous Guard — that’s the big green building, you would’ve seen it coming in — if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” Mordred remembers to say before Gawain leaves and he’s left alone, and Gawain smiles back at him, and it’s only half an hour later, after everything Mordred owns and several things he doesn’t have been unpacked and placed on shelves, that Mordred remembers where he knows that name from.

He had not, before that ill-fated journey to Camelot, been an only child. And, he remembers now, not  _ all _ of his older brothers had made the journey with him.

\--

Adjusting to Camelot is... a challenge. People are welcoming, but still it’s a challenge; Mordred is all too aware that he doesn’t know the rules here, doesn’t know how much he can pass off as having been raised in the wastes or what will mark him immediately as someone to pay closer attention to. He trades the spare guns and ammunition and clothing for clothes and boots that actually fit; water and food are shared here — there’s  _ enough _ to share, here, at least within the town walls — and he shares what he has, marks it down in his mental ledger as trade for the room and bed and space. Wastelander men wear their hair short, apparently. Mordred braids his back and away from his face and doesn’t cut it.

In Annwn, silence was safety. People walked quietly, talked quietly, used the echoes of footsteps to navigate. Here the sounds ring and echo off the walls and make it nearly impossible to hear where anything is coming from, and people say “coming through” or “hey, I’m in” like it’s something you do casually, and not a gesture of trust. They announce themselves to strangers and it isn’t a threat, isn’t a display that they’re strong enough they don’t have to care who can find them. Mordred learns voices, learns to mimic a wasteland accent even though it’s not as if anyone here would recognize a Saxon one, learns footsteps as well as he can among all the noise, learns Camelot’s layout until he’s confident he could walk through the town blindfolded and not hit anything.

The Pendragons themselves are, of course, omnipresent. Mordred takes care not to pay his father too close or too obvious attention, but he can’t keep part of himself from tracking Arthur’s steady footsteps. Guinevere has a long-familiar and ever-present wariness to her, and Mordred quickly learns not to stand between her and the door; Lancelot wears his hair long like Saxon men and unlike wastelander men, and he smiles easily and works slowly but without flaw and he agrees when Mordred asks to learn how to shoot, shows him with steady hands how to care for a gun, adjusts his arm and smiles even broader than usual when Mordred manages to consistently hit the target. “You’re managing very quickly,” Lancelot tells him, quiet and sure; Mordred doesn’t mention that this isn’t actually the first time learning to shoot, that this isn’t even his first time being taught by Lancelot, that he’d been very young but apparently some things you don’t forget.

Arthur habitually calls everyone  _ son. _ Mordred gets very, very good at keeping his face even.

And then there’s Gawain, who can’t possibly be this solicitous with every newcomer; he stays by Mordred’s side, offers explanations of who everyone is and who the best person to ask would be for any question Mordred happens to have, shows him how to tell when the machines that make bullets out of scrap metal need repairing and the fastest way to tighten up the bolts on the water purifiers, brings him food while he’s working and sits and talks with him while he eats it. Mordred — isn’t sure how to talk to him, what to say, what he  _ can _ say without getting into subjects he’d much prefer to avoid with anyone here and especially with Gawain in particular. Mostly he just keeps quiet and listens.

He signs up to be a knight, to aid in Camelot’s defense, when he’s confident enough with a gun in his hand. He’s looking to be trusted, to be close enough to power that he can actually make a difference, and if fighting and killing is the way to do that, that’s what he’ll do.

A woman dies (of old age, which is apparently closer to seventy than to fifty in Camelot, Morgan might still be alive if only she’d been born in the wastes and not in Annwn, but Mordred doesn’t think about that). There’s a wake; Mordred doesn’t attend, he doesn’t even know her name, it would be presumptuous. They drop her body down to Annwn.

_ Wasteful, _ snarls one part of Mordred.  _ Charity, _ says another, trying to be soothing, failing; the people of Camelot don’t see it as a gift and never have, they call it disposal and never have to think about the rot again and Mordred’s people will eat for a week but that’s only the point to him.  _ Hypocrisy, _ says yet a third, _ that they hate the Saxons for desecrating the dead but they don’t even bother to honor them themselves. _

_ Please be quiet,  _ Mordred says to them all, and chews on his lip all through the next day, runs his tongue over the raw skin to taste the blood.

\--

Mordred wakes up and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

Everything hurts. There’s too much light and his eyes hurt and his entire torso hurts, which makes sense, because the last thing he remembers is gunshots and someone yelling and his side bursting with pain, and his throat is even scratchier than usual and it  _ hurts. _

He shifts, trying to find a way to position himself that doesn’t hurt, except that just hurts more. His voice is locked quiet and he can’t get a sound out but if he could he’d be whimpering.

“Oh thank fuck, you’re awake,” says a voice from somewhere to his left, and Mordred’s out of it enough that even though he knows every member of the round table by voice and most of them by footstep it takes him a moment to identify Gawain.

He opens his mouth to try to respond or ask what happened or where they are, there’s metal above them but Mordred doesn’t recognize this room, but his voice still isn’t working and all that comes out is silence.

“We’re in my room,” Gawain says, speaking uncharacteristically quietly. He’s sitting in a chair next to the bed. Probably that has implications but everything hurts too much for Mordred to think about them. “You’ve been out for about twelve hours, it’s morning.”

Probably that has implications too. Mordred tries to speak, fails, nods, and immediately regrets it.

Gawain starts to say something, then stops, then tries again. “There’s water — no, don’t try to get up, I can — here.” The water tastes exactly like all other water in Camelot does, but it’s the best thing that has ever crossed Mordred’s tongue. “You can go back to sleep if you want.”

A more tentative nod. He settles back into the bed as best he can (ow ow  _ ow) _ and closes his eyes and doesn’t sleep exactly but — drifts. It’s quiet, mostly, the door opens and shuts a few times and there are murmurs outside. Everything continues to hurt but in a dull, hazy kind of way, and by the time he’s startled fully awake by two sets of footsteps on the hallway floor the light has changed, the sun brighter than it was; it might be early afternoon.

“Have you slept since-?” says a voice from the doorway. Guinevere’s, high-pitched and hard-edged.

“No,” Gawain says, still from the chair, or at least from where Mordred remembers the chair being; he’s angled towards the window and hurts too much to want to move. “Someone needs to keep an eye on him.”

“You also need to sleep.” Lancelot, steady as he always sounds, from a bit behind Guinevere. “‘Someone’ doesn’t actually have to be you.”

“Not sure you’ve noticed but my bed’s a little full.”

There’s a long pause —  _ why _ do people in Camelot communicate with their faces so much — before Guinevere says, “Well, ours isn’t. Go get some sleep.”

Another long silence in which they are all almost certainly doing things Mordred cannot see or read with their eyebrows, and then Gawain sighs and stands up. “You’ll-?”

“We’ll get you if he asks for you,” Lancelot tells him, and there’s a rustle of fabric and then Gawain leaves.

More footsteps; a sudden increase in weight on the end of the bed, light enough that it has to be Guinevere’s. “It’s almost kind of sweet,” Lancelot says, now from the chair.

“It’s stupid.” Mordred’s felt steel softer than Guinevere’s voice is right now.

“Not everyone can be like you, love.”

“What  _ happened?” _ Mordred says, before they can continue. “Last thing I remember is someone yelling and so many gunshots I couldn’t tell what they were saying.”

Guinevere laughs, sharp and short. “Oh, good, I was wondering when you’d admit you were awake.”

“That would’ve been Gawain,” Lancelot says, more helpfully. “He, ah, ended things very decisively when you went down.”

“By which Lance means that he killed the man who was going to kill you and then took down all the others singlehandedly while screaming at the top of his lungs, and might have gotten shot himself if Tristan hadn’t dragged him out,” Guinevere adds, and smiles at Mordred in a way that is clearly full of implications but everything hurts too much for him to work out what any of those implications  _ are, _ except that Gawain — cares.

Cares enough not just to save his life, which of course any of them would do for any knight, but to go half-mad when Mordred is hurt, to refuse to sleep to take care of him, to risk his own life for Mordred.

“Thank you,” is all Mordred says, is all he can say.

\--

It takes three days for Mordred to move back to his own room, and five more after that before he’s up and (carefully) working again, keeping the various machines maintained. For the next several weeks Gawain follows him like an echo, carries extra water however much Mordred insists he can manage.

Gawain would go half-mad if Mordred were hurt, would run screaming at loaded guns to defend him. Between the clangs from outside and the pulse of water in the purifiers and the  _ tck _ and  _ whirr _ and  _ chunk _ of machines working it’s never really quiet, but sometimes it’s quiet enough that Gawain’s bright voice rings in Mordred’s ears, yelling itself hoarse between booming gunshots.

Gawain brings him food, carries extra water. In Annwn you would bring a gift to someone whose tribe you hoped to join; that is, someone you were courting. Not all courting was for love but there had been a language, of sorts, and Mordred had been conversant in it, if not fluent, and water was what you’d bring someone you’d fallen in love with. He reminds himself almost daily that Gawain cannot possibly know that, that the language is different here and that Mordred doesn’t know it.

Remembering that first day after the firefight, lying half-aware in Gawain’s bed, with Lancelot and Guinevere smiling like there was a joke they were all four in on, Mordred suspects the language here isn’t so different as one might think.

There are, of course, other things to consider. Gawain doesn’t know, that Mordred too is Ygraine’s son, that one of his siblings at least is not as dead as he might think, that Mordred who he adores is of the people who he despises. And, Mordred reminds himself,  _ hates _ that he has to make the effort to remind himself, Gawain despises his people, and however well Camelot might treat him, he is here to do a job and not to reap its wealth.

Also, Gawain is his brother, and Gawain might not know it but Mordred does. The knowledge is of surprisingly little salience compared to everything else.

“What do I do?” Mordred asks Lancelot, because he can’t truly explain but he doesn’t have anyone else to go to. (Morgan, once, but she’s dead and gone and Mordred will never be able to ask her for advice again. Arthur, maybe, in a different world, although a world where he could ask Arthur would be a world where Gawain would  _ know, _ and this wouldn’t be a question in the first place.)

Lancelot looks at him, very seriously. His hands are still, holding a gun cloth but not cleaning his rifle. “I don’t know. But I don’t doubt that he would marry you, if you asked.”

“How helpful,” Mordred says, and Lancelot laughs, and the moment passes and Mordred still has no idea what he’s doing but it’s good to know he has a place here no matter what he decides. (Well. No matter what he decides as long as it doesn’t involve revealing that he’s a carrion-eating ghoul, by heart and home if not by blood and birthplace. But there you go.)

In Annwn, silence was safety. There is no true silence in Camelot but still Mordred waits and listens, waits and listens as Tristan loudly predicts that Gawain is going to get his heart broken and Dinadan smacks her arm and tells her to be less of a gossip, waits and listens as Bedivere pulls Gawain aside to have a hushed conversation in which they both keep glancing over at Mordred when they don’t think he’ll notice. Waits and watches Gawain play with Iseult and Tristan’s daughter, watches him and Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur all laughing together at the Guard.

Waits until midday, when most people stop working for an hour or so while the sun’s at its harshest, to take Gawain’s arm and pull him back to Mordred’s room.

“I still don’t know how you do things in Camelot,” he says, hopes with all his strength and then some that it sounds like he means  _ as opposed to in the wastes, _ “but if there’s something you’ve been waiting to say — now’s as good a time as we’re going to get for you to say it.”

Gawain just stares at him for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he finally says, “I didn’t mean to —” and he stops.

“Sorry for what?”

“For putting you in a position where,” and Gawain makes a frustrated sound before continuing. “I’m saying this wrong, aren’t I. In the wastes I know it’s different but here in Camelot you  _ don’t _ put people in a position where they have to say yes to you, and I’m older than you and I’ve been here much longer than you and I’ve been making things very obvious and I’m sorry if I’ve made it awkward for you to say no.”

And… huh. Mordred would never in a dozen years have thought of the possibility that Gawain would think that was worth apologizing for, that  _ anyone  _ would.

“You’re assuming my answer would be no,” he says, even though it makes his heart pound in his ears, even though there are a dozen reasons it’s a terrible,  _ terrible _ idea, even though even though even though.

And Gawain grins, broad and straightforward and brighter than the high noon sun, and Mordred can’t regret it, even though.

\--

It would be easier, perhaps, to think of how gentle Gawain becomes with Mordred as something he’s doing, and not as something he is. To think that, in the same way that Mordred is a Saxon but can  _ do _ wastelander, Gawain is a fundamentally violent person but with Mordred he  _ does _ gentleness. Verbs, not adjectives or nouns.

It might be easier to tell himself that Gawain isn’t gentle, isn’t kind. He is loving and fierce and protective and violent and hard-edged and with Mordred he  _ does _ kindness, with Mordred he gentles himself.

Easier and, Mordred thinks, almost certainly untrue.

Gawain makes a soft sound, curls closer around Mordred. He’s very warm and Mordred is already too warm, but he went a very long time without being held and doesn’t particularly care to disentangle himself.

“Good morning.” Gawain’s hair is rough and he wears it short, like wastelander men do, and it curls around Mordred’s fingers when he plays with it.

“Morning,” Gawain says, opens his eyes, smiles over at Mordred. “You’re very good, did you know that?”

“You told me,” and there’s no way not to hear how Mordred is smiling. “Extensively. For most of the night, if I recall correctly.”

Gawain laughs and sits up. “C’mere,” he says, pulls Mordred forward into his lap and kisses him, languid and open-mouthed, buries his fingers in Mordred’s long hair.

Mordred lets his eyes fall closed and leans into the touch, makes soft breathy noises into Gawain’s mouth, and lets the hands in his hair move him wherever Gawain likes, for what might be a minute or might be five before he pulls back just far enough to say “We do have work we need to get done today.”

“Is that a stop?” Gawain says, suddenly very serious, pulls his hands away, and Mordred smiles and pushes his forehead against Gawain’s, takes Gawain’s hand and moves it so it’s back in his hair.

“It’s an ‘if you want to take me apart for hours again, it’ll have to wait,’” he says, “or maybe a ‘go faster,’ or —  _ mm!” _ and then if they don’t say anything more for the next minute, or five, or twenty, who’s to say?

\--

For one day of every year, Mordred finds out three months after they move in together, Gawain grieves.

Mordred leaves him alone for most of the day, comes up with tasks for himself when he’s done with work; he isn’t sure whether he wants to know. But by evening he’s running out of things to do with his hands and — he loves Gawain and Gawain loves him and it can only be so bad, right, the worst story it can be is the one he  _ already knows _ — he goes back to their room and sits down next to Gawain.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he says, instead of  _ what happened, _ because in Camelot you  _ don’t _ ask what happened unless you know for a fact that it’s welcome.

Gawain makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob or might be somewhere in between. “Yeah. Okay. Sure.” A deep, rough breath; he’s obviously been crying all day. “I have — or, I had — three brothers and a half-sister. Agravaine, Gaheris, Gareth, Morgause.”

Mordred carefully doesn’t react to the name that is no longer his but curls inwards at their brothers’ names. Agravaine had been left in charge of taking care of him when Ygraine was busy, or maybe that was Gaheris, Mordred’s memory has blurred them together in the intervening twelve years; Gareth he remembers better, they’d been nearly of an age.

“They weren’t old enough to come with us, when the Pendragons went to claim Camelot. So they came afterwards, with the rest of Arthur’s old camp, and I was the one who was sent to collect them.”

Which would explain some of the fragments Mordred wasn’t supposed to hear with Gawain’s name in them, surely.

“Everything went wrong,” Gawain says. “The journey was a hundred miles and  _ everything _ went wrong. The bike broke, and then a wheel broke, and then the axle broke, and then there was a storm, and they sent me ahead to get help, and when I got back everyone was dead.”

Mordred remembers that too, remembers the dust that clung to everything and meant he’d had to pry his eyes open whenever he woke up because his eyelashes had been stuck together in his sleep, remembers going through and getting rid of everything but the most needed supplies — he supposes now it was so they wouldn’t have to carry the weight, although he hadn’t understood what was going on at the time, only that something had gone very badly wrong and everyone but him and Gareth knew what it was and to be terrified of it. He reaches out for Gawain’s hand.

Gawain doesn’t take it. “Because the ghouls had gotten there before we did, and killed them.”

That isn’t true. Mordred  _ knows _ that isn’t true. He knows that isn’t true because he’d been the only one alive by the time the Saxons had found him in the first place, and he opens his mouth to tell Gawain so because  _ this is important  _ but Gawain continues on, “And I’m going to slaughter the vultures who  _ ate my brothers,” _ and Mordred stops cold.

Because it wasn’t the Saxons who had eaten Mordred’s brothers.

He’d been the last one left alive and he’d been six years old and he had kept himself alive by being too young to panic and do something stupid, too young for it to occur to him to try and walk into the wastes alone for help, and too young for it to have been drummed into him that there was a respect the dead were due.

“I,” Mordred says. Swallows hard. “I’m so sorry.”

Gawain makes an angry, bitten-off sound. “Hardly your fault.”

He’s not going to cry. He’s not going to cry, he can’t, he can’t admit —

“Oh, sweetheart,” Gawain says, and then Mordred is being gathered in Gawain’s arms. “It’s okay,” Gawain whispers, buries his face in Mordred’s (long, Saxon-long) hair. “They’re never going to take anything of ours again,” and all Mordred can do is cling to him.


End file.
